Speeding up Outlook Express on Windows XP over satellite

My brother is in the field with Doctors Without Borders. I'm posting this question on his behalf.

We use outlook express (on a pc running windows XP) and a 9600 baud dial up satellite phone modem to get our email direct from the server in Paris. As this is a very expensive way to communicate (our satellite bill is > $50K a year, no joke), it seems like trying to streamline is a good idea.

Here's the question- when we connect, the sequence goes:

1. Send outbox mails. This goes pretty quickly, probably 10-15 seconds for each email, up to maybe a couple minutes for an email of 150k or so). The status bar moves pretty quickly, according to the emails sent.

2. The system then says "Checking for new messages on (our account name), and "Receiving list of messages from server". This takes a long time. Like 10-15 minutes. The status bar crawls along.

3. Then it receives the messages. "Receiving messages from server". Again, each message takes 10-15 seconds, and this part moves along reasonably fast.

I'm curious as to what is going on in the second part. It takes forever, and doesn't seem to be part of the sending or receiving messages themselves. Is there a way to speed up the process by changing a preference with communicating with the server or something?

Does anyone have any advice for him speeding up what Outlooks Express is doing? Obviously his software is ancient and adding more software is not realistic based on the connection speed.

Thanks!

Solution 1:

I would guess the problem is that the mail is being retrieved via pop3 but not being deleted from the server once it's downloaded. Every time outlook express connects, it has to download the index of the mailbox before it can know what messages should be downloaded. If old messages are never deleted, then the index will only grow.

Outlook express has an option to delete messages older than x days, or delete all downloaded messages. Deleting all of them is best for efficiency, but the risk of losing messages is higher. In either case, if the computer dies, the messages are completely lost, unless the ISP has some sort of backup.